Introducing Vandana Kumar | Careers at Megantic
29 November 2022 Blog Posts
Vandi Kumar is one of our Technical Project Managers. She has worked with Megantic for over a year now and has 10+ years of experience in the digital marketing industry. Some of the clients she has worked with include Dinosaur Designs, Bondi Born, Wahu and Goldelucks, and she has spearheaded the strategy behind many other award-winning campaigns.
I spoke with Vandi about her career growth at Megantic. Read about her journey below.
Hey Vandi, how are you today?
Hi, I’m great and honoured to be interviewed today.
What is your role at Megantic?
As an SEO strategist, I work directly with clients, partners and internal teams to develop and deliver organic search strategies for eCommerce projects for assigned accounts. My role here is not just to build tailored SEO strategy but to also build trust in our clients and partners. We do this by building out a road map and to prioritise SEO recommendations to facilitate our implementation.
What do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of your role?
Oh, honestly this is my dream job because there’s one thing I love. I love to learn new things and with SEO it’s constantly evolving. As SEO evolves, so do I. It’s exciting to test and implement new features to better serve Google’s results.
What are you currently working on, Vandi?
I’m currently working on Milligram, a designer stationery, office and lifestyle store. They joined us around two months ago and are currently in Stage 2 of our three stage strategy. This week I’ll check in on the client to discuss how we can recreate a full menu layout with indexable facilitated sidebar for both desktop and mobile. We’ll also run through the importance of assigning products in a timely manner to help us move the project move smoothly to stage 3. At this stage I like to discuss the priority target pages, where we create custom content for these pages and help drive our campaign goals to key areas so we can help spend our resources wisely.
What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of your role? The easiest?
One of the biggest challenges we face is time management and prioritising what is important to deliver results. For any successful SEOcampaign it’s all about prioritisation and task management structure to spread out the workload across resources we have. By using our internal CRM tool and documenting our implementation work, we are able to improve the day to day activities.
The easiest aspect to this role, using a variety of tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog and Google Analytics to provide updates and audits to clients so they are aware of the ongoing results.
How are you continuing to learn and improve your skills?
Digital marketing is always changing and evolving, it keeps me on my toes and there’s always something new to learn and test. I continue to learn by following the latest trends from experts on Twitter and Linkedin, listening to digital marketing podcasts, and reading SEO news websites (like Search Engine Land and Semrush).
I am also continually inspired through fostering team collaboration and promoting internal discussions through knowledge sharing with the internal Megantic team.
What is something that you have recently learnt that you have shared with the Megantic team?
I’ve recently shared some updates from Google Search Central – the October 2022 spam update. I also found a great resource using a Google Sheets template on improving organic CTR (click through rates for organic search). It pulls data from Google Search Console to identify clicks, impressions, CTR’s and maps out the Meta data from a Screaming Frog crawl. You can then use this to identify lower performing pages, and update their title tags and meta descriptions. Check it out here.
You were also one of the mentors in Megantic’s mentorship program this year. Can you tell us about that experience?
Of course! I was selected to be one of the mentors last year and I ran a session on technical SEO. The program gives students an opportunity to explore and learn more about what full time work in a digital marketing agency involves. This valuable experience provided me with genuine gratitude for being able to engage with the mentees. The ability to convey and share my own experience of working with an agency, helped me grow on a personal and professional level.
I also informally mentor Junior Project Managers on how to execute technical SEO tasks and also how to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape of clients, results, strategies and Techstack.
What was the best piece of advice you have received and do you have any of your own for aspiring Project Managers?
Never stop! Continue to build expectations, build the communication to senior management and clients about how long it takes to see SEO success. As SEO practitioners, we have to understand people, data and analytics. Setting expectations and goals from the beginning will help drive success to partnership and campaign.
Thanks for chatting with us, Vandi. We’re excited to see where the future takes you and how you will continue to grow with Megantic.
Want to work with Vandi? We have open opportunities in our Project Management team. Apply today.
